The disclosure relates generally to cleaning fixtures for components, and more particularly, to cleaning fixtures for cleaning components using solvents and pressurized gases.
Additive manufacturing includes a wide variety of processes of producing an object through the successive layering and/or formation of material rather than the removal of material. Additive manufacturing can create complex geometries without the use of any sort of molds or fixtures, and with little or no waste material. Instead of machining objects from solid billets of material, much of which is cut away and discarded, the only material used in additive manufacturing is what is required to shape the object. One example of additive manufacturing is stereolithography, which utilizes photopolymerization to create components or parts from a resin material. Specifically, the stereolithography process utilizes a liquid resin material that is exposed to an energy source (e.g., light) which causes the exposed portions of the resin material to solidify, and form a polymer. In the stereolithography process, each layer of the component may be built before a platform adjusts the position of the built portion of the component to provide more resin material between the built portion of the component and the energy source. The resin material positioned there between may be utilized to form the next layer in the component.
Because additive manufacturing typically requires components to be surrounded by, exposed to, and/or layered with unprocessed material, finished or complete additive manufactured components often have excess, unprocessed material formed on surfaces and/or included in features. For example, components formed from stereolithography often include unprocessed resin material included on the surface and/or within features (e.g., channels) of the polymer-formed component. If not removed from the component, the unprocessed material may result in undesirable build effects on the component after performing post-processes. In stereolithography, the unprocessed resin material that may remain within a channel of the polymer-formed component may become partially-solidified and/or permanent when performing post-processes on the component (e.g., curing, heating, polishing and so on), which may result in partial or complete blockage of the channel within the component. Blockage of the channel may adversely affect the intended functionality and/or operation of the component built using stereolithography.
To remove the unprocessed material, components built using additive manufacturing processes often undergo a cleaning process. However, conventional cleaning processes are often ineffective; especially when components include complex geometries and/or features. The conventional process for cleaning components formed using stereolithography is to “rinse” or “soak” the polymer-formed component in a solvent-solution bath. That is, once the stereolithography component is formed, the component may be placed in a solvent-solution bath for a predetermined amount of time to remove any unprocessed resin material that may remain in and/or on the component. However, merely soaking the component in the solvent-solution bath is ineffective, and conventional stereolithography components often undergo post-processing without all of the unprocessed resin being removed.